The economics and politics of instability, empire, and energy, with a focus on Latin America and the Caribbean, plus other random blather and my wonderful wonderful wife. And I’d like a cigar right now.

March 21, 2011

People who talk about Bahrain are frustrating me

It isn’t just Matt Yglesias, but he went ahead again and stated that the United States needs to do more about Bahrain:

If the point of intervening in Libya is to establish a precedent that dictators can’t massacre people to remain in power then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen in order to make that work. If the point of intervening in Libya is to have a “demonstration effect” that bolsters the forces of liberalization in the Arab world, then the Obama administration needs to toughen its line on Bahrain and Yemen. ...

The fact that we’re [intervening in Libya] only serves to strengthen the case that we need to be taking the modest easy steps available to us to advance the same goals elsewhere in the region.

What “modest easy steps”?? Cutting military assistance? Sanctioning Bahraini banks? Those are neither modest nor easy, and worse yet, I am at a loss as to why they would work. (Further complicating the Western position is the fact that the GCC is backing the U.N. on Libya.) I am also at a loss as to why we should consider Bahrain’s oppression as being something on the same scale as the Stalinesque massacre that was bearing down on the Libyan rebels. The U.S., right now, is very explicit about our anger at the Bahrainis and Saudis.

I would like to have somebody lay out the “modest easy steps” that the U.S. government should be taking with regards to the situation in Bahrain. Seriously, I want somebody to convince me that such options exist! But just calling for some sort of magical pixie dust, or demanding even harsher U.S. rhetoric with no thought as to the consequences, that is just dumb.

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I dont know what to make of Yglesias on Libya. His response to Chait yesterday about how the existence of people who only want humanitarian improvements in Africa if they are accompanied by wars is really odd. The alternative to doing nothing is most likely widespread slaughter of civilians and Ghaddafi emboldened. The international circumstances lined up to make it relatively easy to push him back (though of course much more could yet happen). If you believe that there are moments when military force is justified, this would seem to be a very clear-cut case of one. Even if you accept the idea that the logic for Libya means we should be doing more elsewhere and we are therefore hypocritical for not doing so, that's not an argument for laying off Libya. How would that be better than the status quo?